found_drama

The sun of winter
descends into the lake’s skin
and She waves goodbye.

Got a better spot than last year, at least as far as pictures go. Speaking of which: here are the rest of the Mardi Gras pictures.  (I think that this one is by far the best.)

A lot of Obama supporters and stickers out there in the crowd today.  Let’s hope that bodes well for March 4th.

After one hell of a week, A. & I decided to take the Friday off to regroup and recupe. A little time outdoors seemed like the perfect way to get our heads at least a little back together. So we jammed out to [tag]Mt. Hunger[/tag] to do that climb. She’d done part of it before but had to quit halfway through and I’d merely made it to the parking lot last spring (where we were clearly unprepared for the apparent snow drifts near the summit). And so after a slow morning of breakfast and light chores, we made an afternoon hike of it.

More photos from the hike on Flickr.

Perfect day for it, too. Got home, rounded up the snaps from the hike, decided I had enough pseudo-panoramics to make a set of those, and made a quiet night of it. However, there is a quick story worth telling:

On the drive back up to [tag]Burlington[/tag] from [tag]Waterbury[/tag], we got caught in a little bit of the traffic slow-down on I-89 near [tag]Bolton[/tag]. (Where all the construction is…) Traffic hadn’t narrowed to one lane yet but it was a little stop-and-go for a few minutes. At one point, a man in a brand new Mercedes-Benz pulls up along side us and rolls his window down.

“EXCUSE ME!”

“Yes?”

“How long have you had that Rabbit?”

“About a month.”

“How do you like it?”

“I love it.”

“Awesome.”

Window rolls back up.

True story.

On my walk home from work this evening I witnessed something that’s going to stick with me for a while.  For the folks “not from around here”, [tag]Burlington[/tag] apparently has a fair number of immigrants from various parts of the world; in particular there are a pretty good number of [tag]Somalian refugees[/tag] here (so I’m told).

Anyway:

I took my walk home from work along the waterfront and was jamming up Depot Square to hook back up with North Avenue.  Anyway, there were a bunch of kids (maybe six to eight years old) playing on the hill there.  They were riding their bikes up and down that steep hill: playing, going fast, having fun, being kids.  Then there’s this moment as The Helicopter passes overhead.

The kids freeze.

Now, it hadn’t occured to me until they froze that they might be Somalian themselves.  Skin that dark?  It was certainly a possibility.

But the thing that stuck with me was the freezing.  Maybe three seconds.  Three seconds is not that long but as the helicopter passes overhead, its red cross larger than life on the side, it feels like a bleeding eternity.

Maybe they were just being kids.  Little boys like loud things like helicopters.  Maybe they were just taken by how low overhead it was flying.

But I can’t personally remember ever standing frozen like that just because a helicopter passed overhead.

Last Thursday we big [tag]Barre[/tag] goodbye.  It was a great place to live and I’ll certainly miss it.  If only work would have agreed to relocate there.  Alas, it was not meant to be.  Anyway, we turned our keys over to the new owner and hope that the joint treats her as well (or better) than it treated us.

As for us?  Today is the day for [tag]Burlington[/tag] (or as A. calls it: Burling-tron - - City of the Future).  All the t’s should get crossed today and the i’s dotted tomorrow.  But we expect everything to wrap up between today and tomorrow.

I might finally be able to stop holding my breath and let my life get back to some kind of normal…

Thursday evening it seemed that we’d never get moved and then Friday everything sort of collapsed in on itself and we discovered that we had about 5 or 6 days to wrap everything up.  (EEK!)  That said, A. & I are now in a mad scramble to cross our various t’s and dot the various i’s to close the book on our [tag]Barre[/tag] chapter and get ourselves settled into [tag]Burlington[/tag].  It’s certainly not going to be a fun next couple of days as we make all of the various phone calls to turn off this and activate that and update the mailing address on the other thing…  Unfortunately only about a quarter of the above can be done easily (read “online”) and heaven forbid you attempt to cancel any services without speaking to a human being who will no doubt interrogate and/or berate you for your decision.  While I don’t necessarily expect that from (for example) my local, municipal water/sewer department, I must admit to dreading that call to Verizon.

The real pain in the neck has been trying to unload some of our “good but we don’t want it anymore” furniture.  When you’re not armed with a truck, it’s difficult to move around these kinds of items.  Thanks to JDS though, we got turned on to the Washington County [tag]Freecycle[/tag] list and have a couple of takers (apparently) on those items.

Anyway, this whole “move” business just so happens to fall square in the middle of what was planned to be one of my busiest weeks at work and so now not only is everything feeling “last minute” but “panicked” and “last minute”.  Lucky for my A. has volunteered to handle many of the arrangements but there’s still too much for any one person to do.  Seeing as how we’re about 60-70% packed at this stage (and have dumped all but three of the items we’ve been looking to dump), at least that part of the equation is in decent shape.  Anyway, appearances here are expected to be scattered for the next week or so.  Wish us luck!

House hunt goes very average. Price points are tough in greater [tag]Burlington[/tag]. We saw a half-dozen places in 48 hours that have left us feeling very flat. We’re not afraid of a little elbow grease to get a place in order but it also seems a little ridiculous that something should need $10-20k in immediate work just to be livable. And I’m not talking luxury living here. I’m just talking the basics: safety, hygeine, and energy efficiency.

That said, we’re reconsidering a lot of our assumptions. But not without wondering how other folks can (in good conscience) put a house up for sale when it needs so much attention.

The real drag of the weekend has been the weather though. Two weeks of rain. I guess we needed it but I’m getting pretty sick of weather maps that look like this:

…Mark G. was up this weekend to spend his vacation with us and get some hiking in. And instead we’ve sat around the house or dragged him into town while we cruised houses. What a sordid state of affairs.

A crazy couple of weeks tearing by.  Seems like we just got through the grand’rents’ 50th and then our own kitchen counters ordeal and things just keep grinding on.  Aside from the usual hands full action (work for me, dissertation writing for A.), all the other down time is filled with those all-important projects like writing/revisions or else fitting in last-minute-ish things on the house.

But the sigh of relief comes in the first palpable steps toward halting the hour-each-way [tag]commute[/tag] that we’ve each endured for the last two years.  We’ve gotten pretty attached to [tag]Barre[/tag] and would probably stay right here (in this little house) if it weren’t for that blasted hour door-to-door.  So we got all excited this week as we (1) got the letter from the bank green-lighting us as “serious” buyers and then (2) got the paperwork signed to get us on the market as serious sellers.  The part that got us a little down though was how discrepant the markets seemed to be between Barre and [tag]Burlington[/tag].  I’ll admit to a near heart-sinking when we realized that the competitive price we’d extrapolated on our place based on Burlington prices fell a little dramatically when we lined it up a little better with the Barre market.  Maybe that was just a mistake on our part.  Still, the realizations over the past couple days illuminate why I’ve met so many people that commute 45-60 minutes here in Vermont.  The factors start flying by: little to no public transport, geographically discrepant housing vs. job markets, lower apparent overall salaries (with only slightly lower apparent COL)…

I’ll just be glad when this phase of my moving process is over and it works out to be not nearly as catastrophic as I’m making it out to be.  Wish us luck.

currently playing: a portable dishwasher marketed as silent is not nearly the case